DIY LEGO chess game board and pieces

A couple months ago my son and I were going through the enormous tub of LEGOs, trying to decide what to do with them. We have so many that no one plays with all of them. The pieces from multiple sets are all mixed together. We could build a city, but no real place to keep it without it getting in the way somewhere. So, my brilliant minded child decided we needed to make a chess set out of our LEGOs. The idea stopped there until last weekend.

DIY LEGO chess game board and pieces

Again, sitting around staring at the LEGOs, wondering what to do, I remembered the chess set idea and started digging for pieces. Our first task was to find enough people parts. It took about 3 hours to find enough pieces to make 2 full 16 piece sets to make a chess set that had some kind of coordination going on. We didn’t have enough parts to make identical pieces so we decided we didn’t want them to completely match anyway.

LEGO headsLEGO chess game we built ourselves

The play pieces couldn’t match exactly, so we matched pant and hat colors and made sure colors for the teams were separate. We have a red team and a blue team and each has a king and queen. We’ve got all other pieces built out with their little quirks. Bishops have space helmets, pawns have life jackets, armor and baseball caps. We even tried to give the knights the saddle piece without a horse, but it wouldn’t attach to the board (it’s only ment to attach to a horse). Some of the players are extra helpful, like pawns with shovels and brooms… because when you battle, you do make a mess. We’ve even got a camera man in the mix.

LEGO chess game red team

LEGO chess game blue teamLEGO chess set kings and queensMake your own LEGO chess gameMake a LEGO chess game board

What turned out to be the most difficult part was building the board. LEGO sets we have don’t seem to have many standard bricks. So, we built the board out of flat pieces. We’ve got black and then shades of gray and a few white, but it makes sense enough to play a solid chess game. We finished off the board by adding a little flag to each team’s side.

After a full day of Chess board building, it doesn’t even look like we’ve made a dent in the pile of LEGOs, but at least we finished a project and now the whole family can play with it!

From the look of the player outfits, can you guess which sets we had in our LEGO tub? What’s your favorite LEGO build?

Welcome! I'm Jen Goode. I am an Illustrator, Creative Adventurer and Doodler in Charge at JGoode Designs, a Denver based design studio. I am a multi-tasking idea girl who loves to explore and create in 100 different directions... constantly. I hope you find creative inspiration here!